Lamb
by LynnAshe
Summary: Character study.  Reid during and after Fear and Loathing, 2x16.  Warning for explicit drug use.  One-shot.  Please read and review!


**Warnings: **Explicit drug use; and, this is another post-Revelations fic, I couldn't help it! I love _Revelations_!Reid.

**Disclaimer: **Not mine. Address CBS with concerns regarding harm done to characters taken out to play for this fanfic. I put them back!

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><p><em>How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth...<em>

-Isaiah 14:12, NIV

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><p>Reid wants to bite his tongue and fold himself away but the rage searing through him feels like it could obliterate the universe. Emily's face is shocked and hurt, turning stiff as he stalks away.<p>

He curls his fingers into the sleeves of the ever baggier cardigan, and closes his eyes.

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><p>In the station, the face in the mirror is no longer familiar. Instead a haggard, strange, <em>yearning<em> peers back at him, dull but not yet dead. He fumbles the vials out of his messenger bag, where they lay in the front pouch, beside a slim volume of Margery Kempe his mother had pressed into his hands, returning it to him in a wordless benediction, when he had slipped away to visit her after, to torture himself.

He had still been limping.

_What did she mean, _One of Kempe's _minor_ works, _this was the only book she wrote_...And Reid's mind has done one of those skips lately that makes him think he might be closer to falling than he knows.

That this was how she reminded him she loved him, when those three words were lost in his maelstrom of pain, he almost remembers but cannot connect.

He clasps the vials in his hand, notes his metacarpals sharp and jutting through his skin, and then Hotch's voice is calling, and he suppresses a shudder and stuffs the vials back. So far this case he has managed to hold himself back from more than looking at them.

Worshipping them.

The vials are filled with a translucence that is all that is holding him back from complete and utter dissolution.

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><p>There are words, and there are images, burning into his mind. In the end it's not the blood, not the mangled flesh, that makes him press his knuckle to his lips, hiding the way they twist in tears and nausea.<p>

What makes his mind flash to memory more vivid than a photograph are the leaves, old and damp and broken beside the victim's head.

And he doesn't know _why_.

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><p>On the jet, he feels his teammates watching, even Prentiss, and they are sorry and guilty and helpless. He supposes what happened, having to watch everything that happened, must have injured them, too.<p>

So he lets them, and he tries not to mind, even while the anger that baffles him keeps him constant company.

Morgan wants to play cards. He deals a hand, Reid looks at his and all of a sudden a balm of statistics and chance of probability, _this hand is _97 _to 1_, slips through his thoughts. It's the first relief he's had since they started this case, and his eyelids slip down, heedless of the other profiler watching him.

Of course, Morgan won't leave him alone, pushing and prodding until the anger by main tired force yanks his eyelids, his face, back up, drops his knuckle from his lips that are pressed against tears and nausea again, even though this time there are no triggering crime scene photos of old leaves and corpses.

"I can still do my job, all right? I'm not going to freak out." His voice is a hiss but Morgan's pause is too brief.

"You think I don't know that?"

So, for the first time, he gives something more than, _I'm fine. _Voice scarcely above a whisper, Reid says, "I know what they were thinking and I know what they were feeling, like, _right before_."

I can't focus on our cases, I can't do my job as well-

Morgan tries to tell him this is something good, this is _empathy. _And when Reid protests, Morgan tells him to let this make him a better person.

_A better person._

His face feels cold, his lips refuse to smile. He holds Morgan's eyes for a moment before he has to look away.

_A better person._

Than _what?_ The pieces of himself are unrecognizable as such, a puzzle not even Reid can reassemble.

Something, pain, tension, despair, they weigh him down and make the light bright enough to hurt.

He stares back at his cards and the anger, frantic, is unable to do anything to stop the numb dullness that creeps back over him. He no longer cares that his hand is 97 to 1.

He plays anyway.

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><p>Back in his apartment, his sanctuary, thank God. He closes his eyes, presses his back against the locked door and lets himself sink to the floor, messenger back clutched in front of him. The room is quiet, dark, the overhead bulb has burned out and the only light comes from a small night light in the hall leading to the bedroom.<p>

With a shuddering gasp he pushes the anger aside and pulls out his vials, his needle, the anger is incongruous here where he is safe and so near relief.

Gossamer wings enfold him in sharpness as he tightens the belt around his bicep, quiet and rustling of secrets as he steadies the needle against a plumping vein.

_Do you know what this is? It's God's Will._

"Raphael," he whispers to the emptiness. He hisses at the sting of the needle, the _click click click _ of Russian Roulette, and depresses the plunger.

The needle is still in his arm as he slowly slumps over, or Raphael's wings are cutting him. In the back of his mind there is a murmur, seventy-nine percent of individuals using narcotics will experience an adverse effect, including hallucination.

This Raphael can't be real because he died back in that cemetery in Georgia.

But then, so did Reid.

The blessing of _not caring_ floats through him, takes him not away but into himself, into a place where he can finally rest.

He tells himself that he survived, that everything will be okay, that he didn't leave the human part of him back in that half-dug grave.

And in this place, even when he recognizes the lie, the sorrow carries no pain.

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><p><em>"Worthy is the Lamb who was slaughtered-to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing."<em>

_ -_Revelations 5:12, NLT

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><p><strong>Please review, I treasure your impressions and feedback and they are a great motivation for my writing! I am currently at work on a ReidEthan, then (pre-slash) Reid/Hotch fic set post 4x24, _Amplification_. Please let me know if you are interested!**


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